


The taste of home

by imsfire



Series: Celebrate Rogue One characters 2018 [9]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Cooking, Feels, Gen, Memories, Mild Angst, Sadness, midwinter festival traditions, the evocative power of food from home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 00:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: It's midwinter, and Bodhi has managed to get hold of the ingredients to bake a traditional Jedhan sticky cake.





	The taste of home

**Author's Note:**

> For week two of Celebrate Rogue One; prompt, Bodhi and Home.

Midwinter on Hoth; not that you’d know, Bodhi thinks ruefully.  The sky is as grey as ever, the temperature as low and the snow as thick as at midsummer. 

But it is officially the shortest day, and that means the Festival of Lights. 

As luck would have it, on his last supply run he was able to do some personal shopping, in an open-air produce market that was achingly like the markets of his childhood.  With a few extras begged from Stores added to his purchases, and the use of the galley on a docked transport, he’s got the means to make his favourite Midwinter Festival treat.  Or something very close to it.

His mother never used a written recipe, but he watched her often enough through the years to feel fairly hopeful about quantities and method.  He sets out his ingredients along the back of the galley worktop.  Honey, eggs and butter – he hopes the blue colour of the latter won’t carry through, Mother always used snow-white buffalo butter for baking but all he could get was bantha.  Breadcrumbs, citrons, crushed munu nuts, spices, Corellian brandy, baking soda.  More honey and whole spices for the syrup.  A big, flat baking pan, a couple of basins and a broad mixing spoon.

Into the bowl with the butter and a hefty measure of honey.  Beating them together produces a rather unappetising grey mixture; blue butter mixing with golden-ochre honey.  Again that faint worry surfaces, that the final result will have a blue tinge.  Nothing he can do but press on and hope.  The proof of the cake is in the taste, not the colour of the crumb. 

Luke bakes regularly for their friends, and he’s yet to see his partner produce a blue cake or a grey pastry.  Foolish worry, go away.  Only – this is different, because it’s traditional, and it’s for the vigil gathering the Guardians have offered to all the Jedhans on base, and it’s – it’s the taste of home.  He hasn’t had sticky nut cake since he left Jedha.  If he gets it right, it will be the essence of everything they’ve loved, and lost, and are fighting for.  Home in every mouthful. 

It’s a responsibility.

He cracks and separates the eggs and stirs the yolks into the creamed mixture.  Then a glass of the brandy; and he’s stirring something akin to soup now.  Cream of honey and booze.  No wonder this recipe was a once-a-year treat.

He peels the citrons very finely and shreds the golden peel as thin and small as he can before stirring that in.  The sweet-sharp odour of lemon-wine is like a whole citrus grove in autumn.  Bodhi hangs over the bowl, sniffing appreciatively.  He didn’t visit the agricultural regions of the south very much; they had no family to visit there, and holidays weren’t often possible, with Mother’s finances so tight and his and his sisters’ education to be paid for.  But once smelled, a Jedhan citrus orchard is unforgettable.  Even in the city, in the chilly northern barrens, some people grew them in yards or as street trees.  You never knew when a waft of that scent might come across the rooftops or out through someone’s courtyard door.

It’s a big bowlful of perfumed goo now.  But the texture looks about right.  Bodhi throws in a cupful of the rough-ground nuts and stirs them in; and then a cupful of the stale breadcrumbs scrounged from the mess.  Slowly, the mixture starts to thicken up and become viscous.  Ground mixed spices next, and then more nuts, more crumbs.  One more lot of the nuts.  And now for the really fun part.  Or maybe not.

Mother had a special tool for beating eggs, and whisking cream, making oil-based sauces.  An irregular oval of spiralling wire loops, fixed in a wooden handle.  The range of tools in the average ship’s galley doesn’t run to anything like it, and he’s pretty sure a fork wouldn’t do the same job at all.  So he’s made his own whisk, out of sterilised sensor-array wires.

It doesn’t feel anything like Mother’s, of course.  He remembers that was heavy in his grip, the carved handle rubbed and oiled, worn smooth by decades of use, the whole thing perfectly balanced.  Once you held it, you could almost intuit how to wield it.  His imitation is far too light, and there’s nothing to get a good hold of in the hurriedly-twisted wire handle.  But it’s what he’s got.

He can still make the right movement with it, though it’s too loose somehow.  His arm movements feel uncontrolled, almost floppy.  It’s because of the lack of weight, he realises; and tightens the muscles of his forearm to reduce the amplitude of the motion.  Otherwise, he’ll be splashing egg-white everywhere.

Dharini always made a mess if she was given anything to beat.  Splosh, splash, spilled cream on the worktop; their Mother laughing helplessly, Samruta chiding and chivvying their baby sister, and bossily passing the job to him saying “Watch Bodhi, ‘rini, he’s good at this because he’s _paid attention_ ”; and Mother still laughing, laughing…

It was a happy kitchen, a happy house.  The steady movement of beating the eggs into a foam is hypnotic; and Bodhi can almost see that scrubbed stone floor, the wooden counters on either side of the stove, the light coming through the window, wintry and oblique but still bright, making shadow patterns from the lace of bare branches on the persettia tree outside, that by month-end would have the first yellow buds again.  Mother’s cherished pots of herbs on the sill, fresh green in that cool light. 

And the sound of her loom in the next room, when she went back to work while the scent of baking cake filled the house.  The rhythm of his childhood; clack of the treadle, swish of the shuttles, soft thump of the heddle.  Sometimes she sang while she was weaving.  Sometimes Sami sang too, through her voice was light and fluty compared to Mother’s.  And the honey-scent would grow stronger and sweeter, and outside the sun would sink low, and the lanterns would start to be lit for Midwinter’s Night.

Bodhi’s arms ache; he’s swapped sides twice but made himself carry on beating, and now he’s looking at a bowl of something smooth and white as the snow outside, and stiff as wax, rising into determined peaks each time he lifts his whisk.  He’s almost overdone it.  Almost, but not quite.  Ready to fold into the honey-nut mixture.

His mouth suddenly waters at the remembered taste and smell of Midwinter.  Sticky cake, spicy juice, sweet hot tea, smoking hot candle wax; strong drink from the shebeen in the alley, sweat from the all-night dancers in Temple Square.  The monks singing down every street.  Incense burning on every corner shrine, and lanterns, lanterns everywhere; and happy faces, and gifts.

The oven is warming already, and he’s lined a recycled plastene ration baker with oiled flimsi for a pan.  Final stage.  He sprinkles the soda into the mixture and stirs it in, then quickly upends the egg-whites and stirs them in too; but lightly, so lightly, slicing them into the mix instead of scooping and beating.  Pours the whole lot into the pan.  Prays the pan is big enough.

It is.  Just.  Good thing this never rises very much, though.

And with a sigh of relief he puts it into the oven and sets the timer.  _And breathe_.

He could just leave it now.  It will take half an hour to bake and he could go out and get on with some maintenance work, on this ship or his own.  But the heat from the on-board stove has warmed the galley deliciously, and soon there’ll be a smell even more delicious.  And there are the bowls to scrape and put through the sonic, and the syrup to prepare.  By the time he’s got settled in to a different job, he’d be needing to clean up and come back anyway.

There are still several spare sheets of flimsi.

 It takes a while and a few false starts, but by the time the sonic has run through the cleaning cycle and the cake is almost done and smelling like paradise, he has four paper lanterns folded.  Plain white, rather than the traditional bright colours, and of course he’ll never be able to get candles for them, he’ll have to put a little LED nightlight in each one instead.  But with a bit of fumbling and bodging he’s managed to recreate two of the best traditional shapes, the Star-flower and the Temple Tower.  They’ll have to stand on the table, he doesn’t trust this thin paper to hold up under the weight of a nightlight if he hangs them.  But they’ll look right, along with everyone else’s lanterns; one for his father, one for Mother, one each for his sisters.

Bodhi sighs; and suddenly remembers he hasn’t made the cake syrup yet.  Hastily he retrieves a cooking pan from the cupboard and puts it to warm; scrapes the last of the honey into it and adds a couple of sticks of sweetbark and an orchid pod.  The smell of heaven gets even stronger.

The cake comes out golden-brown, no sign of a blue tinge.  Foolish, foolish worry.  And Luke will be proud of him, baking such a fine-looking cake.  Mother would be proud.  When he pours the hot syrup over it, the spices infuse the air with perfumes of home.  Bodhi spears the crust repeatedly with a skewer and watches in delight as the thick honey soaks in.

Done.  All done.  The warmth and the sweet smell of a glorious Midwinter’s Night, conjured from nowhere, from a few packets and jars, a handful of eggs and spices, some stale bread and crushed munus.

He can see them, his sisters and Mother, clapping and laughing as he brings out their favourite cake with a flourish and holds it up.  Now all he has to do is wait for it to cool enough to carry, and get it (and four paper lanterns?  _What was I thinking of?_ ) across the base undamaged, to Chirrut and Baze’s Midwinter Vigil.

There are more than two dozen Jedhans on Hoth, pilots and spacers of one description or another in the main.  Over the months and years they’ve found their way to the one haven where they can work to avenge their ravaged world.  His won’t be the only lanterns; perhaps this won’t be the only cake.  But all of them together will share the taste of home tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> I have shamelessly borrowed (read "pinched") the concept of the Jedhan midwinter festival of lights from the wonderful skitzofreak. Please forgive me for stealing.  
> The cake recipe is based on a real recipe, for karydhopitta, and if you have the nerve to try it without having quantities or an oven temperature, it's a good cake (and really sticky).


End file.
